As the 2013 fall quarter commences, OMA&D is pleased to recognize the latest group of faculty engaged in diversity-related research, teaching or service who are recently tenured or new to the University.
New Faculty:
Dr. Sara Gonzalez joins the Department of Archaeology as an assistant professor. She recently served as a scholar-in-residence fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton College and prior to that was the Christian A. Johnson Fellow in Anthropology at Vassar College. Gonzalez’s current research interests include the archaeology of colonialism, community and public archaeology, indigenous and feminist archaeology and historic anthropology. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010.
Dr. Sven Haakanson joins the UW as an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and as a curator of Native American anthropology at the Burke Museum. He is a member of the Old Harbor Alutiiq Tribe in Kodiak Island, Alaska, and his research centers on documenting and preserving the language and culture of the Alutiiq. Haakanson also focuses on making collections more accessible to Native communities by researching objects in the world’s museums and developing traveling exhibits, educational programs and resources. He previously served as the executive director of the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska, and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2007. As an anthropologist, Haakanson is currently leading a large-scale study of a sacred Alutiiq site to identify and archive petroglyphs and stone carvings from the southern coast of Kodiak Island. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in anthropology from Harvard.
Dr. LaShawnaDa Pittman joins the faculty in the American Ethnic Studies Department as an assistant professor. She received her Ph.D. in sociology at Northwestern University in December 2010. Recently she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Poverty Research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Georgia State University. In 2011, Pittman completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received her M.A. in sociology from the University of Connecticut and her B.S. in urban government administration from Georgia State University. In addition to her work on grandparent caregiving and intergenerational families, her other research interests include social inequality; poverty; race, class and gender; black women and HIV/AIDS; and health disparities.
Dr. David Suarez joins the Evans School of Public Affairs as an associate professor of public affairs. He came to UW from the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy. Suarez’s work focuses on the relationship between managerialism and organizational outcomes; the consequences of professionalization for the nonprofit sector; and the role of nonprofits in sparking social change and promoting civic engagement. He is particularly interested in collaboration and advocacy, issues that link nonprofits to public agencies and the policy process. His ongoing projects include research on the professionalization of the human rights movement. Suarez’s most recent publication in “Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly” investigates the management practices among international and local non-governmental organizations operating in Cambodia. He received his M.A. (sociology) and Ph.D. (education) from Stanford.
Dr. Hamza M. Zafer joins the faculty in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization as an assistant professor. He received his Ph.D. (2013) and master’s degree (2011) in Near Eastern Studies from Cornell University, and a B.A. with honors in Linguistics & Arabic Language from Binghamton University (2008). Zafer most recently served as a Mellon Sawyer doctoral fellow with the Quran Seminar at the University of Notre Dame (2012-13). He was also a Buttrick-Crippen fellow for the Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell (2011-12). Zafer’s research pertains to late antique and early Islamic exegetical and historiographical sources in Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Classical Ethiopic, Syriac and Greek.
Newly Tenured Faculty:
Dr. Julia Aguirre is an associate professor in the Department of Education at UW Tacoma. She received her bachelor’s degree (psychology) and Ph.D. (education) from the University of California, Berkeley and holds a master’s degree in education from the University of Chicago. Aguirre joined the UW Tacoma faculty in 2007. Her work examines the roles race/ethnicity, culture, class and language play in mathematics teaching and learning. Her goals are to mathematically empower students, families, communities and teachers to strengthen mathematics education access and advancement for all students, especially for those historically underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.
Dr. Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva is an associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history in the Department of History. She holds master’s degrees in Latin American studies and Latin American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also completed her Ph.D. in history. Rodriguez-Silva’s research focuses on racial identity formation, post-emancipation racial politics and comparative colonial arrangements in the configuration of empires. She is the author of “Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico” (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). She is currently working on a second book project titled “Re-Articulating the US Imperial Field: Puerto Rico and the Browning of the Middle-Class, 1940-1980s.”
Dr. Jack Turner is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history, literature and political theory from Amherst College, a master’s of philosophy in political thought and intellectual history from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton. Turner joined the UW faculty in 2007. He is also a member of the Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality. Turner specializes in American political thought, race in American politics, critical race theory and liberal democratic theory. He recently authored the book “Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America.”